Classics

[Caracal]

I'll let historians correct me on this, but my understanding is that it's generally rational to accept interpretations made nearest to the events, and with the broadest consensus, rather than accepting theories first expressed long after the events. It's even more problematic when the theory is presented to support a person's ideological position, rather than resulting from recent discoveries which suggest some of the accepted facts may have been incorrect.

Not really. It's important to pay attention to the primary sources at the time you're studying. However, there's no reason to defer to the work of previous historians writing nearer in time to those events. For example, you want to listen to all the secessionists during the Civil War who told anyone who would listen that they were seceding in order to create a country dedicated to slavery and white supremacy which they believed would be in the vanguard of world history. There's no reason to put much credence in the work of early 20th century historians who ignored all this evidence and argued that actually the Civil War wasn't about slavery because it was actually a declining economic system that everyone knew would go away soon.

[dismalist]

Well, looks like even David Hume was not too enamored of Greece and Rome, for they lacked the Rule of Law.

https://www.econlib.org/david-hume-on-ancient-revolutions/

[Parasaurolophus]

Well, looks like even David Hume was not too enamored of Greece and Rome, for they lacked the Rule of Law.

https://www.econlib.org/david-hume-on-ancient-revolutions/

He couldn't get a university job, which might have something to do with it. =p

[dismalist]

Nay, on account he eventually became Librarian.

More significantly,

Hume wrote that he "went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills", taken along with a pint of claret every day.

I'm sure the pint of claret did it for him. :-)

[Parasaurolophus]

Touché!

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Follow-up article on CHE:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/if-classics-doesnt-change-let-it-burn
"Among humanities disciplines, classics is probably second only to American history for the size of its nonacademic fanbase. Trade books on Greek and Roman history consistently pepper the lists of major publishing houses. Media outlets cycle through think-pieces comparing this or that modern phenomenon to some aspect of classical antiquity. "
I think author conflates classics at its current state with other factors (Hollywood, political science etc) and, thus, greatly overstates its role and relevance.
Her recent book is a good illustration of following the trend, not setting it:
- google ngram viewer indicates that references to Thucydides started to skyrocket around 2005 and peaked around 2013-2014
- in 2017 a book by a political scientist (not classicist) appeared bringing "Thucydides trap" into mass media
- in 2019 the author of the CHE article published translation of selected speeches of Thucydides titled "How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy"

While I am aware that this work probably took several years, it is clearly owing its existence (or at least title) to external interest, not vice-versa.

[downer]

Thanks for the link. I liked the article.

The author writes about the changes in her discipline, Classics. But probably few students these days take classes in Departments of Classics. Most learn about the classics through gen ed courses taught by other departments. I wonder how much that teaching is changing.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

The author writes about the changes in her discipline, Classics. But probably few students these days take classes in Departments of Classics. Most learn about the classics through gen ed courses taught by other departments. I wonder how much that teaching is changing.

This is one of the reasons why I consider this "changing classics" debate irrelevant.
We have original article about a prof in Ivy (Princeton) followed by the article by a prof in Ivy (Brown) in a field where only well-endowed departments are likely to survive. It is also expected that select few survivors in the "Ivoriest" Towers overstate their influence on the world outside.

[Hibush]

The author writes about the changes in her discipline, Classics. But probably few students these days take classes in Departments of Classics. Most learn about the classics through gen ed courses taught by other departments. I wonder how much that teaching is changing.

This is one of the reasons why I consider this "changing classics" debate irrelevant.
We have original article about a prof in Ivy (Princeton) followed by the article by a prof in Ivy (Brown) in a field where only well-endowed departments are likely to survive. It is also expected that select few survivors in the "Ivoriest" Towers overstate their influence on the world outside.

By that description, the two papers well represent the surviving Classics world by covering both sides, HYP and Non-HYP.

[mamselle]

Reviving since I think this thread is probably the most closely aligned with the discussion in this article:

   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

Reviving since I think this thread is probably the most closely aligned with the discussion in this article:

   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

M.

I read this back in December, but I'm afraid it gave me conniptions.

For example:

Between 2012 and 2019, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded annually in English fell by twenty-six per cent, in philosophy and religious studies by twenty-five per cent

US bachelor's degrees in Philosophy actually fell by 13.8% in that period. Aggregating Philosophy with Religious Studies is a really ignorant thing for humanists to do. Frankly, it's inexplicable that we still do it.

Montás complains that contemporary theory—he calls it "postmodernism"—subverts the college's educational mission by calling into question terms like "truth" and "virtue." A postmodernist, in his definition, is a person who believes that there is no capital-T truth, that "true" is just the compliment those with power pay to their own beliefs. "This unmooring of human reason from the possibility of ultimate truth in effect undermines all of Western metaphysics," he tells us, "including ethics." (He blames this all on Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he calls "Satan's most acute theologian," which is an amazing thing to say. Nietzsche wanted to free people to embrace life, not to send them to Hell. He didn't believe in Hell. Or theology.)

Montás doesn't know what he's talking about. This is staggeringly ignorant.

For Montás and Weinstein, though, science is the enemy of ethical insight and self-knowledge. Science instrumentalizes, it quantifies, it reduces life to elements that are, well, effable.

More ignorance on display.

Weinstein won't even call what students learn in science courses "knowledge." He calls it "information," which he thinks has nothing to do with how one ought to live. "Life is more than reason or data," he tells us, "and literature schools us in a different set of affairs, the affairs of heart and soul that have little truck with information as such."

For Montás, the trouble with science is that it answers the important questions—Who am I? How shall I live?—in "purely materialistic terms." He blames this on a writer who died in 1650, René Descartes. "Today, the heirs to Descartes's project are perhaps most visible in Silicon Valley," Montás says, "but the ethic that informs his approach is pervasive in the broader culture, including the culture of the university."

Ugh ugh ugh no no no no.

What did Descartes write that set us on the road to Facebook? He wrote that scientific knowledge can lead to medical discoveries that improve health and prolong life. Montás calls this proposition "Faustian."

This is such a crock that I can't even reconstruct the claim here in a way that makes any kind of sense. Bro, did u even REED dEscaRte5?

Humanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things. They need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos.

Some disciplines do. Many, in fact, including the one they keep traducing.

As for the humanities and the knowledge business, I'm afraid that epistemology has some relatively bad news for you.

Art and literature have cognitive value.

That's a matter of fairly contentious debate in the contemporary philosophy of art, actually. I also suspect that the claim here pertains to either the propositional or the exemplification theories, which have tended to dominate among cognitivists. Unfortunately, those theories are obviously false (as anyone involved in the debate today will tell you).

The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.

There's a whole literature on just this in psychology, actually. Some of the early findings turn out to have been janky, but recent work is quite rigorous.

Knowledge is a tool, not a state of being.

A lazy metaphor, considering that there's a whole subfield of a humanities discipline devoted to figuring out exactly what knowledge is (JTB? JTB+C? etc.).

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight.

There's one of those uses of 'moral' that drives me up the wall. What does it mean, exactly? Because there is one humanities discipline that does pretty much have a monopoloy on moral insight (literally understood). It contains subfields like 'ethics' and 'meta-ethics', among other topics pertaining directly to moral insight.

[hungry_ghost]

Veering slightly off-topic:
I recently became aware of a Classics department with a major called "Ancient Civilization" (just one) that focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world and excludes all other ancient world societies.
Apparently they renamed their dying major a few years ago in hopes of attracting more students.

Thoughts?

[mamselle]

They need to get some art historians on board and broaden their canonical definitions as well as their understanding of trade and commerce in that era.

Mohenjo-Daro? Zimbabwe?

Roman-made glass beads have been found in contemporaneous Korean digs, just to look at things from the other direction.

M.

[dismalist]

They need to get some art historians on board and broaden their canonical definitions as well as their understanding of trade and commerce in that era.

Mohenjo-Daro? Zimbabwe?

Roman-made glass beads have been found in contemporaneous Korean digs, just to look at things from the other direction.

M.

Globalization!

[Hibush]

I too read the New Yorker book review by Louis Menand with interest and curiosity about forumites take.

Menand appears to share Parasaurolophus' view of the two subjects and their understanding of their place in academe.

Although Montás and Weinstein are highly successful academics at two leading universities, they feel alienated from and disrespected by the higher-education system. As they see it, they are doing God's work. Their humanities colleagues are careerists who have lost sight of what education is about, and their institutions are in service to Mammon and Big Tech.

It will probably not improve their spirits to point out that professors have been making the same complaints ever since the American research university came into being, in the late nineteenth century.

After that burn, Menand goes on to describe how the Classics have always served as a protest against mainstream higher education rather than its template.

I don't know the players, so color commentary or context would be good to hear. It appears that this New-Yorker staff writer also has a gig as Professor of English at Harvard, which is about as establishment as one can get in higher ed.

Are Montás and Weinstein lonely up in their isolated Ivory Towers? Do they they have likeminded isolationists at a lot of other places (such as those who vent their frustration in IHE)?  Or is this an odd subset that manages to make a disproportionate noise?